As seems to happen so often, Tamarind's posts inspire excessively long comments from me. Or in some cases, misunderstanding. I checked, this one was definitely written by Tam. So because my comments are of course born of much experience and wisdom, here it is reposted, because that's what I believe should be done with experience and wisdom.

I've played with extremes. On one hand there is my engineer paladin with a teleport ring to Dalaran, a Hearthstone at Light's Hope, a Northrend Wormhole Generator, a BRD remote, and goblin explosion transporters for Area 52 and Everlook. With a single button I can get just about anywhere very fast. It makes me feel like an engineer, to have all these strange devices to travel, which may at times kill me, or worse. But in clear contrast, I've leveled a rogue, yes rogue, so not even a mage with teleports, to level 80 without changing her hearthstone away from the BE starting area. I've played with zero travel time and with 100% travel time, except when I got my mounts: those were super-convenient.

Neither is good for a normal person. The portals to everywhere would ruin the world if they were reduced to a mere game mechanic rather than part of a professional experience. But running everywhere was just as absurd. Maybe we just need two hearthstones. One is Home and one is Away. Then we could have convenience, but not at the cost of the world, and without eliminating all travel forever.

I'm fond of the Wizard 101 way of handling transportation. Every world you're in (think "zone"), you get a free transport (portal) to the local quest hub and your home, usable any time with a 1 minute cooldown. You can also set a beacon almost anywhere (just not in instances) which you can teleport to from anywhere... but which gets consumed when you use it. It's like a single use bookmark, so you can set it if you need to quit, head back to town or home, do your business, then head back to the beacon/bookmark when you're ready to dig in again.